“…As it is in physics, so in morals, there are cases which demand irritation and counter-irritation. The conscience of the American public needs this irritation, and I would blister it all over from center to circumference, until it gives signs of a purer and a better life than it is now manifesting to the world.” – Frederick Douglass
I need to get out of my head. That’s what they tell me. You need to get out of your head. Peculiar. I am in my head. I am in my head? What does that even mean? I know that I have been dabbling lately with being a bit of a scatter-brained, absent minded professor.
Truthfully, I have a considerable grip on my lack of reality despite being overzealous, ambitious with a dash of amnesia on the side. This coveted wisdom of knowing my reality intricately has given me the foresight to devise my villainous machinations and my hundred-year plans in traversing through this resounding drum of spitting glitter with meaningful intention. In my perception I am blindly like a limp rag doll punching through the cosmos accelerated at velocities immeasurable and untamed. An awkward form but a swinging pendulum between predetermined forces and independent steering petitioned only by my own force of will.
You are always a blink too late. That’s what I am told. You need to get out of your head!
I imagine I must be trapped much like photons are contained within the core of the Sun. Do they realize that I measure time in light years? Do they know what is going on in my head? What do you know about each other?
We have been hurtling miles forward in this moment and the person we once were at the beginning of this sentence has traveled through the galaxy, has rotated away from our previous position as terra spins on her axis. We have aged, we have grown hungrier, more thirsty, we have matured, we have regressed. We have breathed and we have exhaled. If you are the same person in the same position at the beginning of this sentence as you are when you reach the end, is that well enough? When would you expect yourself to change? How can you know what is in my head when we have left what was in our heads miles behind mere moments ago.
You need to get out of your head! Strange. What is in here that I must get away from? Is it the head itself? I don’t remember much but my memory is quite profound at times. More precisely for facts and trivia in subjects such as science, philosophy, biology, astronomy, justice, history or sociology. I don’t know how well I am in practice. Is there a difference between forgetting and being forgetful? Is there purpose in knowing the practice of a subject and its entire study without having been practiced? I am anxious to expand and broaden my study and I am anxious to put this study into practice.
I find that my head is my only sanctuary even as it is the source that makes turbulent meaning of the combination of thoughts, fury and panic. My head is also an atmosphere of wonder and possibility, unexplored curiosity, hypothesis and plenty fertile with freedom dreams to get lost among. It is a horizon and a boat tethered to the unpredictable wrath of the sea and sky gods.
It’s like boiling water. See, with boiling water – you first need to pour water into a pot or a tea kettle. The water doesn’t just reach 212 or 100 degrees the moment you turn on the flame. As the flame meets the water it slowly over moments begins to boil. Deep down microscopically there are these tiny fractions of the elements – the building blocks of life and matter called atoms. As the fire meets the water these atoms, although seemingly tiny and insignificant are actually quite mighty.
Each of them begin to grow agitated, begin expelling energy and vibrate under the change in condition. The more they vibrate they begin moving about chaotically and erratically and with so much energy they begin smashing into each other. All that smashing into one another generates enough energy that it transforms into heat. As the heat rises the water begins to boil when it reaches temperature. It’s the basic physics principle and law of motion discovered by Sir Issac Newton – every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction or also known as cause and effect.
The cause for this reflection comes from the recent Business Insider report on ‘How millions are trapped in modern -day slavery at brick kilns in Pakistan.” Reading this headline, reading the article and watching the investigation; there is fire meeting water in my belly and in my chest. This was not the first that I have heard about the human trafficking and slavery of humans in brick kilns. I first heard of this in 2013 on slavery in geography across the globe where entire families have been held in bondage to produce bricks – in India and countries in Africa – to be shipped to Western countries and nations in the Global North for infrastructure and other developments and properties. According to statistics shared by the Global Slavery Index (2018) and End Slavery Now there are 40.3 million people held in slavery through human trafficking – forced marriages, forced labor and other forms of commercial or sexual exploitation.
Decades old knowledge that was decades of knowledge remaining and enduring. There are so many people in bondage and without any course for freedom, so many who will literally know nothing else or otherwise spend their entire lives attempting to escape and be free.My atoms are quivering and shaking on a molecular level. It is an unfortunate understanding that a few generations in twenty years of modern slavery reveals how little advancement humans have made in human rights and dignities. It is a stark reminder that human rights are only a recent project and a new advancement in human history. Even with the existence of Human Rights Watch (HRW), the United Nations (UN), World Health Organizations (WHO), Amnesty International (AI) and others, it is clear that these commitments are not always carried out and protected.
In my anecdotal, professional and personal observations I come to find my atoms vibrating and holding tension. I sweat ever so slightly remembering my own past traumas, harms, persecution and exploitation surviving under capitalism. I feel a great disturbing relief in my many privileges and yet I do not feel fully secure in the privileges of education, geography, access, community and gender I possess. Only true security is to possess land and gaining capital to acquire or reclaim land is denied to those with my race, color, class, geography, faith, and sexual orientation.
There is no real capital success without engaging in a form of exploitation and oppression in our great democratic society. It is awful to claim education, access, community, freedom from persecution, oppression for any reason, a privilege, when each of those are rights. There can be no freedom when my own freedom is secured by the re/placement of my body in this position where mind, money, time and talents are being greedily extracted and mined for more.
The effect is the desire to remove the conditions that would ask for a competitive betrayal of another human for shared resources and a faux perception of control in the wilderness. In this effect I draw parallels between slavery as described by the reports in Pakistan and other Middle East, Asia and African countries and the racial and economic conditions in the United States. Although the empire has institutionally and culturally terrorized me much of my life I have the privilege of being born under and inheriting citizenship. In this examination of privilege I am reminded of what writings in “To Die for the People”express that the empire is not a true nation and that those who live closer to the nation have an illusory perspective of what is going on socially and politically around the world.
It was either Elaine Brown or Huey P.Newton himself who wrote that it is imperative for the working class consciousness, especially those Black to recognize that the empire simply has not turned the worst of its wrath on its own domestic citizens. They cautioned that when the empire grows hungry as it depletes resources and people around the globe it will eventually turn on those domestic citizens who thought themselves safe. It also has been proved throughout history that it will take any measures to maintain its control and power over our lives and movements. These measures can and have been tactics of force or excessive force, surveillance, policing, kidnapping, fraud and a host of other violations and crimes.
It is by now that I am feeling the heat. Claiming this citizenship, I am claiming the legacy and the responsibility of inheriting an empire that would engineer a far-reaching institution that contains 40 million humans. I am a free man after all. Nevertheless, I am a hospital trip away, an industrial accident away, an environmental disaster away, an accident away, a change, transformation, revolution away from a non dissimilar fate. I am expected to chase a permanent fixture and am promised a future of freedom and security in exchange of labor and wages across the lifetime. This future is not equitably promised nor accessible to everyone and it certainly is not a realistic experience for hundreds of thousands of people especially considering current healthcare, economic and social security conditions.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative there are 1.9 million people detained in the United States which continues to speak to the enduring efforts of mass incarceration. There have been 131 mass shootings, killing 11,500 innocent bystanders so far in 2023 alone. The reality that climate change is transforming our planetary biodiversity, rising temperatures race to match rising seas. Is this rise in temperature me or have we reached another record high? It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that I cannot tell the difference. I draw an inevitable conclusion once again of indifference: I am going to die here.
You must get out of your head! I cannot get out of my head because my head is saturated with a bittersweet craving for freedom and liberation for all people. I remain trapped, contained and going mad with the reality that we must endure. I must embrace and compete to maintain my own privilege rather than expose and eradicate the conditions that would place my inalienable human right to freedom and peaceful existence on a murder trial. The logic of our nation is a logic of sickness and delusion. I can write and scratch and yell and shout and I should because there are other voices who are being cut down where mine may rise.
“The United Nations defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons by improper means (such as force, abduction, fraud, or coercion) for an improper purpose including forced labor or sexual exploitation.”
Those who are wealthy and educated continue to blame, shame, guilt and point fingers at those at the bottom for their own sins of greed, maliciousness, gluttony and wrath. There is alienation from their privilege and this alienation leaves them vulnerable to continued manipulation. We must continue to educate them, we must continue to disrupt and agitate their privilege, we must not allow them to believe the way things are, are how things are.
There is cause and effect and we all must move beyond indifference. We must steadily grow more agitated and we must steadily rise in heat. Those who command and participate in this vile institution should know wrath someday as one day the People will recognize that whether educated or illiterate, known or unknown, they deserve freedom and they deserve justice.
When I say free the People I mean to physically, spiritually, emotionally and mentally decolonize. When I say free the People I mean to liberate all those who are held slave, captive, contained or in bondage. When I say free the People I mean to free the people from tyranny, from antagonism and from terror. I mean to free the People from the shackles of this feigning destitute and demoralized empire that some dare call a respected republic as it reaches around the globe enacting surveillance, policing, terror, hostility and violations of human rights.
It is the grip of its culture and influence that has continued the oppression of the Global South and the maintenance of white supremacist Nazism in the Global North to suppress the political uprisings and the organized victory of the People.
Oh, how I must get out of my head.
The Wayward Scholar 
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